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Provides: Finds and fixes album art for your songs
Format: Download or CD
Developer: Equinux
Minimum System Requirements:  Mac OS X v10.3.9 or higher
Processor Compatibility: Universal
Price: $39.95
Availability: Now
Version Reviewed: 3.0.3

If you thought only Apple could have a flawless cover art library for Cover Flow, you obviously haven’t used CoverScout 3. CoverScout 3 is an application that scans your iTunes Library and searches the Internet for art to match your albums. You can use its well designed interface to fill the holes left in your library or even to upgrade the quality of your existing cover art.

CoverScout 3 has a beautiful interface. It’s dark grey on black and uses, what else, Cover Flow to show what your library looks like. On the right side there is a list of all of your albums. The left portion is where you can see what your albums look like, or more likely, what a stack of giant musical notes looks like.

You can do a number of things if you select an album, but I’ll outline them in the order in which you’re likely to perform them. First, you’ll pick an album that needs fixing. Then CoverScout will scour the web—mainly Amazon and Google—and collect a number of choices that may represent your album. You can have them sorted by rating or pixel size. I prefer the pixel size.

Chances are a few of your art options will not be the album you’re looking for. Good thing is you often have many choices, so it’s usually not a problem. Of my 275 albums, it failed to find only about 10 of them. Plus, the images it did find were normally of very high quality, which resulted in me replacing nearly half of the album art already in my Library.

Now, while I was finding and replacing album art, I found myself saying “I really wish I could edit these images.” You see, for some reason, album art on the net often has borders or just looks a little off. It would really be nice if you could remove those white borders, or adjust the levels so that dark grey really looks black like it’s supposed to.

For once, I can say the developers beat me to it. All of the important stuff is already here. You can resize, crop and adjust levels. You’d be surprised how much a simple crop followed by black and white level setting adjustments can do to improve the look of your album art. The crop is even semi-intelligent, cutting out what you obviously don’t need, though it often undershoots by about 1 pixel. In a few instances, I still found myself wanting to edit with a little more control to fix up a few images that didn’t have such great results from the net. But really, there are more features here than I ever could have expected. Give a man a fish and he’ll ask for chips I guess.

Besides the auto-crop undershoot issue, I really only have one issue with this application, and it’s quite a small one. I’d like there to be a find all button. After CoverScout scans your whole Library to find which albums have art and which don’t, you just get a list. It only searches the internet for albums you actually click on. I understand that it’s not always a good idea to search for 200+ albums at once, but when your library looks like Gary Busey, it would be nice to have a fetch all button.

This is by far the best application I’m aware of for finding and fixing album art. It has surpassed my expectations in nearly every way. I found myself needing features, and only seconds later discovering they were already included. I can’t tell you how amazing this application is for album art. If you’re embarrassed to show your library in public, then this is the best choice you can make to have Cover Flow looking the way it was intended.